Song of Ice and Fire Book Thread (SPOILERS)

[naum]

I am puzzled about the "seasons" thing in general -- how a "season" spans many years -- how is that possible in a medieval (or pre-medieval, it strikes me) setting?

If GRRM explains it, I forgot, and that is possible as it's been a few years since I read books 1-4.

[Samwise]

Yeah, I was wondering recently how they have a concept of a "year" that's shorter than a "season".  My best guess is that a year is some arbitrary number of lunar cycles (or larger arbitrary number of days), because nothing else makes any sense.

[Salamok]

hmmm I just felt they have normal non-mystical seasons which combine with the big deity involved mega seasons brought on by the comet.  He never really addresses it head on. 

The Eastern/Valeria continent is R'hllor's main stomping ground, North of the wall is the Other's and the west south of the wall is the contested area, mega-winter won't hit the East unless R'hllor loses some serious ground.

[Merusk]

He never explains it.  He's only recently even begun commenting on food stores and starvation.  Consider how hard a time they've had feeding people even now, in the beginning of 'winter' without it being full-on.  Imagine shit after just 6 months, never mind 2-3 years of it.

It really makes no sense.

[Khaldun]

Pretty much, yeah. Imagine having to put food away for 3 years. Pretty much wouldn't everybody in Westeros be, "Well, we're fucked", at this point? Everyone accepts that the winter is going to be long, it's not one of those things where people doubt or disbelieve that it's going to be long, like with the Long Interval in the first Anne McCaffrey Pern book. Yeah, I know a lot of people are talking about how it's bad, but honestly, not enough and not thoroughly--it just doesn't seem like this is a society with the necessary adaptations to make survival through three years of winter possible. How do animals survive? No mammal can eat enough or put on enough weight to hibernate for three years, and it's very clear that in most of Westeros there's going to be no forage. Birds I guess could migrate.

Has Martin said anything explicitly about the "one continent belongs to this god, the other to another"? Because if that's genuinely true, again, why the fuck would anyone live in Westeros? What's so nice about it that it compensates for occasionally having winters that are 3 years long where almost inevitably most of the people and animals living there die? Not to mention the threat of having supernatural monsters and zombies killing everything in sight. Westeros should be the fucking ass-end of the world with a few miserable assholes living there who sometimes go off Viking-style and rip up the warm, comfortable fatcats on the other side of the Narrow Sea. I can buy the ironmen and such, just not the supposed wealth and power and population density of the Lannisters, Tullys and Tyrells. How is any of that even possible if they're sometimes dealing with winters that last one, two or three years unless they have some kind of magic that explains it?

[Salamok]

Has Martin said anything explicitly about the "one continent belongs to this god, the other to another"?

No, that is just my feeling.

[Rendakor]

I don't think there's been one of these "long winters" in a while, so no one alive remembers the last one and thus, they don't give a shit. Only the people on the Wall have actually seen the undead; the rest of Westeros dismisses them as fairy tales. As for how they actually survive these long winters, no fucking idea. But it never bothered me that no one is taking it seriously because that seems to mirror real life pretty well.

[Arthur_Parker]

My take on it.  The winter is only really bad in the north, so they can ship food in from the south when shit catches them unawares, population on coast more likely to survive.  The reason the long winters are remembered are because so many people die, despite preparations, but it's been so long nobody is prepared and what little preparation they had has been upset by the War.

I found the focus on cannibalism interesting and I'd expect to see a lot more along those lines, I recently read Bloodlands and some of the story elements were very similar to what actually happened in the Ukraine.

My problem with the story goes deeper, I just think he's not going to tie it all together and he's more interested in new viewpoints or boring viewpoints (Cersei for gods sake why?) than writing the characters I actually like.

[Khaldun]

Yeah. I know everyone likes to rag on the viewpoint characters, but it's really a bad weakness to keep diffusing the character focus. There is no reason why Barristan Selmy should not be a character whose actions are well-described by someone ELSE's perception. Someone who is a good foil for him, like Tyrion. It feels like Martin is getting bored with his characters and if he's bored, so are we. If he needs the plot to supercede the characters, then don't write a book that's told through viewpoint characters. He's an experienced enough fiction writer to know that.

[Sjofn]

I don't think there's been one of these "long winters" in a while, so no one alive remembers the last one and thus, they don't give a shit. Only the people on the Wall have actually seen the undead; the rest of Westeros dismisses them as fairy tales. As for how they actually survive these long winters, no fucking idea. But it never bothered me that no one is taking it seriously because that seems to mirror real life pretty well.

This has been my impression as well, that Winter-with-a-big-W hasn't happened in a long, long time, thus most people are idiots about it.

[Arthur_Parker]

I think I'm correct in saying there's been some variation in the length of the winters over the past few hundreds of years.  But if you take "Winter is coming" to refer to a significant event then the last example would possibly be The Long Night

The Long Night is the name given to a period in history where a terrible darkness fell across Westeros and the east. It occurred approximately eight thousand years before Aegon's Landing, in the midst of a great winter that lasted for years. The Long Night lasted a generation and laid waste to much of the world through famine and terror.

Assuming the ending isn't some BSG crap, you'd expect the series to end on an up note at the start of Spring.  Due to the length of time that would involve, I expect the coming of the Others actually makes Winter last longer and their defeat ends the Long Night II.

Edit to add, that's logically how I'd do it, though we might get two books following the life of some wagon maker in Dorne and his annoying neighbour instead.

Double Edit because the last book pissed me off so much I blocked most of it out and I'm thinking about it now, he should stop the sex stuff, some of the recent book was downright creepy, he's on safer ground with cannibalism.

[lamaros]

The sex stuff has always been creepy, especially from female characters. It reads like bad erotic fiction and make me embarrassed to be reading his novels.

[Merusk]

There's good erotic fiction? Lies.

[Ingmar]

I think whether or not you find the sex stuff creepy/embarrassing has more to do with you than it does with the writing. (I do certainly make sure nobody might read over my shoulder during those parts, personally.)

[lamaros]

There's not really good erotic fiction, no, but there is good writing about sex.

I find Martin's attempts to be boring, cliche, and/or misogynistic though. I feel more embarassed reading his stuff than, say, the sex in The Line of Beauty (not that I remember it being especially well written there, just that I remember it being 'not complete crap').

[Merusk]

Misogynistic I'll give you.  Particularly how Dany can't feel whole without a man. 

Other than that it just reads like most other erotica I've seen. Including Anne Rice's "Beauty" series.. (Well, minus the bondage..)

[Quinton]

Yeah. I know everyone likes to rag on the viewpoint characters, but it's really a bad weakness to keep diffusing the character focus. There is no reason why Barristan Selmy should not be a character whose actions are well-described by someone ELSE's perception. Someone who is a good foil for him, like Tyrion. It feels like Martin is getting bored with his characters and if he's bored, so are we. If he needs the plot to supercede the characters, then don't write a book that's told through viewpoint characters. He's an experienced enough fiction writer to know that.

I liked that there were characters we only see through the eyes of others.  I don't mind the occasional "whoah X is now a viewpoint and we can get inside their head" thing, but I do think Martin's gone a bit overboard on it and the number of viewpoint characters is rather excessive now.  Also, you don't necessarily have to get inside a character's head to show that what other characters thought about them may have been incorrect or incomplete.

[Khaldun]

Exactly. All you need is several viewpoint characters dealing with the same person.

I sure as hell hope he has enough remnant sense as a writer not to try and viewpoint Varys: the mystery of his motivations (even now) is crucial to whatever tension is left in the story.

Martin's repeated line on the sexual content (and violence) is that this is a story derived from medieval Europe and that moderns who haven't read up on medieval Europe aren't really very aware of how violent (sexually and otherwise) medieval Europe was.

I buy that up to a point. Since he's using the War of the Roses and the Thirty Years' War as templates, there's definitely something to it. Some of the things that marauding knights or nobility did to towns or villages actually outdo Martin's violence by a good margin. I was just reading a biography of the Renaissance philosopher Montaigne and one chapter deals with the French civil wars between Protestants and the Catholic state, and there was some remarkably hardcore stuff. One thing that stuck with me is a noble send to pacify one part of southern France who routinely just came into a village, looked around to see if he thought people were Protestant, and then had the whole village killed. He had one of his oldest comrades-in-arms killed, a guy he fought alongside a bunch of times when they were young, because he thought the guy might be a Protestant.

There were also disastrous famines, plagues (not just the Black Death) and so on, with a lot of the horrible consequences you might expect. Though on the other hand, there were things that I'm surprised haven't shown up in Martin, like peasant rebellions and apocalyptic cults. And honestly, if winter is what he's setting it up to be, all of that has to stop dead in the next book. Nobody's going nowhere from this point on. In Northern Europe during the Little Ice Age, you didn't travel in winter whether you were a noble or a peasant, and armies in particular sure as shit didn't go anywhere. That certainly seems to be what happened to Stannis, but by that same standard, Bolton should be just as dead stuck in Winterfell with few supplies.

But the rape? I really think here he's stuck in a cycle of trying to top himself with sexualized gross-outs and justifying them as "medieval". Medieval armies didn't hesitate to use rape to terrorize peasantries and town bourgeois, there was the "droit de seigneur", and there were knights who famously had bizarro fetishes (Malory's Morte d'Arthur very poitely and discreetly describes a bad knight who liked to capture other knights, strip them nude and beat them with nettles). But there's still something about Martin's language, obsessiveness and so on that's squicky and using the 'medieval' as an alibi. It's even worse when he tries to do viewpoint depictions of female sexual desire, like Asha or Dany.

[Merusk]

We're not arguing about the quantity.  It's the quality and the psychology.

i.e. Whenever sex is involved the woman is either a whore, a manipulator using sex for power or some variant of Dany's "ooh a man, make me a real woman! tra la la" bits.

[Rasix]

Next book is going to feature some really awkward/odd/aggressive/creepy sex if Circe manages to get Taena back to court.   Gal's head is not in the right place, it could get a bit weird.

Plus, Sansa.  Yah, you know that'll happen.

[Rendakor]

I'm not sure what would be creepier: Sansa/Robert Arryn, or Sansa/Littlefinger. 

[WayAbvPar]

I'm not sure what would be creepier: Sansa/Robert Arryn, or Sansa/Littlefinger. 

Robert Arryn and his snotty nose by far. LF is just the average teeny-groper; SweetRobin is disgusting on his own, and adding sex in wouldn't help at ALL.

[Sjofn]

We're not arguing about the quantity.  It's the quality and the psychology.

i.e. Whenever sex is involved the woman is either a whore, a manipulator using sex for power or some variant of Dany's "ooh a man, make me a real woman! tra la la" bits.

Thing is, it mostly makes sense for the feel of the world he's going for. Women are not the equals of men for the most part, so yes, most of the women having sex with a dude are going to come under those three categories. Although I didn't really feel like Dany's scenes (in this book, anyway) were "ooh, make me a real woman!" but "you are hot and I want to fuck your brains out, and I am obsessing over it because I am still a teenager."

Even so, Asha's sex scene was her having sex with a man she cared about, and having a good time with it. <shrug>

[Teleku]

Hi, I'm late to the party.

Just finished the book.  ARG.

Kind of torn.  I overall still enjoyed it, but there was a lot that annoyed me.  

Plot progression definitely slowed to a god damn crawl this book, compared to the rest (and I just reread the entire series before picking this one up), and I'm not a fan of what he's done with several characters.  Dany's chapters were boring and a waste of time, which sucks since she's been one of my favorite characters from the start.  I mean, when we last left off in book 3, every time we cut back to her she would conquer a new city, or win a new battle, in some awesome manner.  In this book, she sat in her city and whined about not being able to do anything as her enemies surrounded her.  Which they did, with nothing happening for the whole damn book until the dragon scene.  I was really looking forward to seeing what awesomeness she would be up to next in this book, and absolutely nothing happened.

Tyrion went from being awesome fun to read, to me hoping he would die every chapter.  His reaction to his brother at the end of book 3 and this book paints him as a total d-bag.  So his asshole father forced Jaime to lie about his woman/wife, so you fucking blame him and vow to kill him as if its his fault?  His father forced all of them to do what he wanted!  Arg.  He spent the whole fucking book whining about her (despite the fact realistically there is almost no way she actually loved his ugly ass.  I vastly prefer it to be that she really was a whore hired by Jaime).  And then they introduce a fucking female dwarf.  If he wanted a shock ending, they should have killed him instead.

Speaking of which, of course he has to kill one of the only characters left I enjoy (that’s a main character at least).  Hopefully he realizes Snow is to important to kill, since there’s almost no story left worth talking about with him gone.  

What I hope will happen:  John rez’ed by light god, free to kick ass and take names without restriction of vows, the letter from Bolton was just a ploy by red lady to stop him from ranging north, Stannis and the gang is still kicking, North unites with awesome cleverness from Lard Lord to kill all Boltons and Freys.

What I’m afraid will happen (which means GRRM will do it):  John wargs himself into Ghost and runs around being a horribly annoying POV character/thing, Stannis really was wiped out by Bolton (Theon/Ashas/Jeyene all probably left with the Iron Bank envoy when defeat looked inevitable), we get a whole lot more of boring ass Bastard of Bolton being over the top evil and nothing happening in the north.

Having said all that, I still mainly enjoyed the book (well, till the end) and several of the other characters with fewer chapters were still fun.  Arya continues the path to be a total bad ass.  Enjoyed her chapters, and I really like the whole lore and background behind the faceless men.  Looking forward to her in the next book (which means she’ll die).  Onion knights stuff was good, and I continue to like his character (wish we had gotten some more chapters for him after he was sent off however).  Barristian makes a good POV character as well, though not really needed.

I also concur that Lard Lord Manderly is awesome.  I hope they don’t kill him.  I really want to see him fuck over the Boltons to death somehow.  But still, the fact that he killed several important Freys and then fed them to everybody at the wedding was spectacular.

Also, why are you guys questioning that Cold Hands is Benjen stark?  He comes right out and says it in the book.

[WayAbvPar]

Also, why are you guys questioning that Cold Hands is Benjen stark?  He comes right out and says it in the book.

Can you quote the passage you are talking about? I certainly missed it if it is explicitly said.

[Chimpy]

It is not ever explicit.

Shit, none of the background stuff is ever explicit.

Also, I am pretty sure after reading this book that Martin jumped the shark a while back and has begun going into a full-on RobertJordanian "just keep writing" death spiral. Only instead of introducing more boring plot lines with the same characters and never killing anyone off, he is killing everyone off and introducing new characters by the bucketload.

[Teleku]

Also, why are you guys questioning that Cold Hands is Benjen stark?  He comes right out and says it in the book.

Can you quote the passage you are talking about? I certainly missed it if it is explicitly said.

Hmm, sorry, I just went back and reread.  It was this passage that I thought said it:

“A monster,” Bran said.
The ranger looked at Bran as if the rest of them did not exist. “Your monster, Brandon Stark.”
“Yours,” the raven echoed, from his shoulder. Outside the door, the ravens in the trees took up the cry, until the night wood echoed to the murderer’s song of “Yours, yours, yours.”

For some reason I read that as him saying Benjen Stark, probably because there has been heavy foreshadowing ever since book 1 that it would be him (in book 1, Bran is told the story of a hero who journeyed beyond the wall for years, and survived by being rescued by the children of the woods.  Bran then asks if they thought that's where his uncle Benjen went then, to get help from the Children of the Woods, and was down with them.  And now coldhands shows up working with the children...).  And also because it was pretty late at night when I was reading that, heh.

So, my bad.

[Threash]

Jon is gonna be a wolf, at least for a while.  Otherwise there would be no point to the prologue that basically goes out of its way to remind you what happens when skinchangers die.  I doubt he will stay that way though, during one of Melisandres chapters at one point she thinks "i keep asking R'hllor to show me Azhor Azzai and all he shows me is Jon Snow".

[Ingmar]

Jon is gonna be a wolf, at least for a while.  Otherwise there would be no point to the prologue that basically goes out of its way to remind you what happens when skinchangers die.  I doubt he will stay that way though, during one of Melisandres chapters at one point she thinks "i keep asking R'hllor to show me Azhor Azzai and all he shows me is Jon Snow".

Yeah, which doesn't really say much for Melisandre's deductive abilities.

[Threash]

I like that actually.  She is continuously shown what is going to happen and she keeps screwing up the interpretation of it.  Still, when someone who can obviously see the future tells you to watch out for daggers in the dark you keep a god damned body guard, even she mistook one girl for another.

[WayAbvPar]

I like that actually.  She is continuously shown what is going to happen and she keeps screwing up the interpretation of it.  Still, when someone who can obviously see the future tells you to watch out for daggers in the dark you keep a god damned body guard, even she mistook one girl for another.

I think that is why I was so glad to get a POV from her- it really took the mystery and BS away from here and showed her to be just as human and fallible as everyone else, which makes her interesting and not annoying like she was before.

[Draegan]

I finished this on wednesday and I agree with a lot of what Teleku said.

Tyrion was still the same awesome I thought, but it was all travel scenes.  Kind of annoying until the end where he signed up with the Second Sons.

Daenerys was irritating because it was all about her doing nothing, wanting to fuck Daario, and doing shit in a non-badass way.  She got lost in her savageness. As she kept her dragons penned up she lost the "Blood of the Dragon" attitude.  She's going back to the beginning now and I think she'll be back as a badass raining fire down upon her enemies.

I love the whole political battle of King's Landing from AFFC and liked seeing that plot line moved on.

The whole Bolton plot line was boring and irritating.

The Wall plot lines were pretty stale, but moved a bit.  Everyone here has already said what will happen to Jon.  GRRM needs to get his character out into the world a bit I think.

The whole Quentyn/Dorne plot was interesting but I'm glad he's dead.  I fell asleep a few times during his chapters.

Looking forward to more Jamie/Brienne.

They need to clean up the whole Asha/Theon plotline, consolidate the eastern continent.  Bring everyone to the Western continent.

[Threash]

I thought the Bolton/North stuff was the best part of the books.

[Teleku]

I liked the north political stuff overall.  So seeing what was going on in Winterfell and Stannis's army was cool.  It was neat to finally get some decent insight into the lords and political situation of the north, which never felt as fleshed out as the rest of the realm, despite it being half the damn realm.  What I hated specifically is Ramsey Bolton.  The character is just so god damn over the top cruel and shallow its annoying having him around.  I wish it was just Roose, who is a much cooler villain.  I'm really hoping that Ramsey pisses off his Dad somehow and finally has the bastard flayed.

[Draegan]

What I hated specifically is Ramsey Bolton.  The character is just so god damn over the top cruel and shallow its annoying having him around.  I wish it was just Roose, who is a much cooler villain.  I'm really hoping that Ramsey pisses off his Dad somehow and finally has the bastard flayed.

This is what I hated.  Which was a ton of the Reek chapters.  Or all of them.  Roose was a badass guy that I enjoyed reading about.

The wall/Stannis stuff was good.

Actually, everything with Theon was retarded.

I did like how Bran talked to him through the trees.  That was kinda cool.  Needed more Bran.